A big publishing house equals more clout, more marketing, more sales… right? I thought so, until I moved jobs from a small indie publisher to a publishing giant. Turns out, the answer is more nuanced than I thought. Here’s what I figured out:

She’d just received the standard, weekly sales sheet. This was my first one, as I’d just joined Random House from a then-indie publisher called Quercus (now part of Hachette). I scanned the sheet — author names on the left, number of books sold that week on the right. We all had to sign it to show that we’d read it.

Not good. Only a few stand-out authors had sold books in the thousands, but they were the outliers. Some newly launched authors had sold well below a thousand copies, some sub-100, some weren’t even on the chart. On weeks where a new John Boyne or Jacqueline Wilson launched, obviously the sheet would look different, but that only happened a few times a year.

If you plotted all the sales on a graph it would be a hockey stick for the big hitters and a long tail for everyone else.

These figures didn’t look that different from the sales I had seen at Quercus. Back when I started there, there were just three of us, setting up a brand new children’s list for a startup publisher. And our Sales Director was snooty about children’s books. Yet the sales figures at Quercus were only mildly lower than what I saw at RH. (Maybe we just punched above our weight at Quercus.)

Publicity is down to the tenacity of the publicist.

I had the privilege of watching Nicci Praca at Quercus lead the campaign to get an unknown Scandinavian writer in front of reviewers, bloggers and journalists. The author was doing well in his home country but the UK was (back then) notoriously uninterested in translated fiction. But Nicci’s obsession for Steig Larsson was infectious, and spread to the point where I was having a competition with the marketing director about who could read the unpublished The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest first. We were all talking about this great series we were publishing, and soon the obsession was too big for just our company; it spilled out everywhere. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo hit the bestseller charts worldwide, won awards and was made into a film with Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara. I make it sound simple, though obviously it wasn’t.

At the smaller publishing house, Quercus, the Publishing Director questioned me about the publicity plan for every book. At Quercus, I worked with Nicci to push hard for every single book on our children’s list. I called TV networks and radio stations; I befriended bloggers and threw them parties. I even tried to hire a wolf for a party for a paranormal book about werewolves–a ridiculous stunt but there was nothing I wouldn’t try.

At the larger publishing house, I was only ever questioned on the big-name authors. It was easy for the mid- to lower-list books to get lost and de-prioritised.

At the larger publishing house, I fought with time-deprived publicists to help my authors spread the word of their upcoming books. Sometimes we managed to get traction, sometimes we didn’t. Sometimes we were allocated zero budget to publicise a book, ZERO! Just because my authors were published by one of the largest publishers didn’t guarantee them anything other than the basics.

Well, of course, we didn’t know; NO ONE knew. It was leaked by Rowling’s lawyer, for which he was sued. Rowling had wanted to live like common people and she had succeeded, for a bit.

Our clients were a dozen European and US publishers across the world like Penguin Random House Spain, Montadori Italy, and they relied on us, their Scouts, to keep them in the know over which unpublished and published books were being talked about, which authors were rising, and anything significant in the book industry.

At any one time, a good Scout can tell you the top 10 books editors or agents are reading ; their job is to know. But they are human and, as in the case of J.K Rowling’s secret, there are things that simply can’t be known.

But let’s rewind a bit.

Scouts fit into the big puzzle of international rights, so to understand them you need to know the basics of how books are sold from writer to publisher to foreign publisher.

My simplified version of how author get their books published around the world. (Skip if you already understand this.)

Authors sell books to a publishing house, normally in their home country. That publishing house will often ask if they can buy the international rights as well, so that they can sell the rights to publishing houses in different territories like Germany, France, Spain, etc. In other situations, agents will try to sell international rights themselves. In the case of Robert Galbraith/Rowling, her agent, The Blair Partnership, held onto international rights. Whoever has the rights, they try to sell them to other publishing houses , and take a fee for sales. Open the book market and of course it’s like any other industry, a complex marketplace–the products are books, the brands are authors.

Now, the official way of selling rights is for the rights team to contact editors in international publishing houses and persuade them to buy. For example, see below for how Little Brown advertised Robert Galbraith’s book, available for sale in their Frankfurt Book Fair 2012 catalogue. You can see they’re naming the Blair Partnership (an agent) for translation rights. It would be a year later before the secret became public.

Cue — the Scout.

However, if a publishing house wants a warm body on the ground, a local informant, assessing what’s really going in a country, they employ a Scout. This will be someone who know the local market, knows the agents, the editors, knows what’s being talked about, and what deals are about to be made. As a reader, you won’t have heard of a Scout simply because you’re not their market. But if you’re reading an American book that’s been published in the UK, or see a UK book that’s popular in Sweden , that book has likely been read by, and possibly recommended by, a Scout to a Publisher.

A good Scout knows what’s hot before anyone else does.

Forty-eight hours before huge publishing deals like Fifty Shades, you’ll have seen a UK Scout on the phone to their US clients telling them they have to read the book NOW.

Everything for a Scout is about relationships–how much the local editors and agents like and trust you, and how much your client trusts you. Being a Scout involves a lot of face-to-face meetings, coffees and drinks galore . It’s your job to know everyone.

As a Scout, I jotted down storylines that agents told me they were reading from full or partial manuscripts, sometimes no more than a line. If I knew a manuscript was coming in on the 10th of March, I’d have a note to call that agent or editor on the 11th to ask if I could finally see that elusive manuscript. Maybe it would be groundbreaking, maybe it would be mediocre; whichever way, I needed to read it and find out.

And when a story was right, I’d pass that information to clients in territories that I thought were right for it.

As a Scout, you have to be able to get your hands on what your client needs without compromising your relationship with editors and agents (who often don’t want you to have the manuscripts until they’re ready).

A Scout has a unique overview of the entire market.

Walk into any book fairs where editors come to buy and rights teams come to sell (Frankfurt, LBF and Bologna are the biggest in Europe), and in that crowd there will be a handful of Scouts keeping an eye on dynamics and sending daily reports from their phones about which books are selling like hotcakes.

As an editor, I went to book fairs and had scores of meetings with US, French and other foreign publishers selling their books to the UK. It was busy but fun, like window shopping, only for books. The only stress was worrying that we might be missing ‘the next big thing’ (likely from the US).

As a Scout, my experience at a Book Fair was a completely different and thrilling experience. I went to Bologna as a Scout, and I had to know what every UK children’s publisher was selling, even the books that were ‘hidden’ for a surprise announcement.

I remember our Hungarian clients arrived late to the fair and had back-to-back meetings about to start. I stood huddled in a corner of the conference room, with a publisher and editor. I had 20 minutes to give them an assessment on the top 200 books that were available at the fair and a few others that agents were talking about but not selling until after the fair. I pulled out my 40-page report and highlighted the top 10 for them, and sent them off, asking them to call if they needed help with anything. I visited all the UK publishers throughout the day, and called my client when a book they wanted had started to sell across the world. I was on call the entire time but loved being so deep in the early stages of publishing, and playing the role of matchmaker, on speed.

Of course, the real hard work had started around 6 weeks earlier when I was talking to editors and agents about what they were reading. And 3-4 weeks before, I was reading manuscripts I thought would be most important for my clients.

Did I mention that all the reading was in my own time?

Daytime was for meeting editors and agents and writing reports, and in the gaps of every other moment, I read — while brushing teeth, walking (I nearly got run over), during dinner, after dinner; I read myself to sleep. My head was a mashup of a million brilliant storylines. I picked up late night emails from clients that would be hilarious in any other context.

I had just started dating someone, and thankfully my new girlfriend was amused rather than annoyed by my permanent attachment to my Kindle.

Even after I left Scouting (it was a maternity cover), I would, for the next 2 years, see new books released in Waterstones or on Amazon that I had read years previously, unedited.

Please welcome self-proclaimed book junkie Parul Macdonald to Writer Unboxed! Parul will be joining us 4x/year to add a new and valuable perspective to the site. Parul has been an editor at Random House, Quercus and Cornerstones, and a Literary Scout. For an editor’s view on indie-publishing and a look at publishing uncovered, follow her on Twitter @parulmac or visit her new blog, Publishing Squared.

Welcome, Parul!

What an Editor at a Publishing House Is Looking For: 6 Myths & Truths

Dial back a good few years, and I had just put the phone down with an agent. I had acquired the UK rights for Never Fall Down, by Patricia McCormick, a powerful, hard-hitting book about a boy escaping the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. I know, cheery stuff. But to me it was an astonishing book, and a book I felt readers in the UK needed to read.

The boss, the Publisher, walked across the room to my desk — ‘Have you already signed the contract for your book?’

I told her I had. Trouble was, they had just read another hard-hitting book, and she thought that one was more commercial. But it was too late, I’d already made my move on the book I loved, so she had to pass on the opportunity for this second book.

Who knows what we told the agent or the writer about why we rejected the second book , but the truth was we only had space for one of that type of book that year and my acquisition had taken the slot. There was nothing wrong with that second book. It had nothing to do with the author’s social media followers or her publicity plan. Nothing to do with her cover letter. Just plain bad luck and unfortunate timing.

Sometimes I wonder if authors and aspiring writers really know what’s going on in publishing houses — what motivates editors and why they say yes or no to an unpublished book.

I regularly scroll through advice given online to aspiring writers about how to approach editors and how to stand out. More often than not, I wrack my brains to remember: Did I ever care about that as an Editor at Random House, or did I hear fellow editors worry about this in editorial meetings?

The obvious thing I want to point out is that editors have two forces at play when they look at a manuscript.

Their love for a book, or their intuition about that book’s potential to be a bestseller

The company’s position : Are they acquiring? Is there a lockdown on a certain type of book (e.g. paranormal) because the list already has enough of that scheduled in the next year?

So here are some things I often read, and here’s what I think are myths and truths.

Myth #1: An editor is looking for an author who ‘speaks the right language’ of the genre, and has a compelling cover letter.

While it’s nice if an author can make comparisons between his/her book and other bestsellers in the market, I’ve certainly invited authors in who don’t read in their genre but have produced a page-turning book.

YES, authors who can speak the right terminology are great on festival panels, but when I read a manuscript it was because an agent had convinced me with their great description to do so—and because I trusted that agent. I never picked up a manuscript just because it was described well by an author I met at a conference or fair.

Of course, it’s helpful for an agent to see a smart cover letter that sells your book well, but smart ones will get the gist of the story and read a sample to see if they like your style and writing. My advice is not to overly worry about this till you come to submit. In the meantime, just focus on your story. Once you’re coming to submit to an agent, you can take time to hone your pitch.

Myth #2 : An editor is looking for an author with a massive social media following.